Greywalker (Greywalker #1) by Kat Richardson

When Harper comes to in the hospital, she begins to feel a bit …strange. She sees things that can only be described as weird-shapes emerging from a foggy grey mist, snarling teeth, creatures roaring.But Harper’s not crazy. Her “death” has made her a Greywalker-able to move between our world and the mysterious, cross-over zone where things that go bump in the night exist. And her new gift (or curse) is about to drag her into that world of vampires and ghosts, magic and witches, necromancers and sinister artifacts. Whether she likes it or not.

Rating: 4/5

There were some things I absolutely loved about this book: the concept of the world, how the magic is built up and actually works, “the grey” — all of that was great. The writing was only decent, in my opinion, so I can’t give this a rave review. There were a few things about Richardson’s writing style (and Harper’s voice) that got on my nerves. Unfortunately, I can’t really remember what in particular irritated me enough to articulate it here, so clearly it didn’t detract from the book too much. I’m not going to dwell on it.

From a world-building perspective, I love this book, but it definitely feels an awful lot like an intro book. I don’t think this book in isolation was really all that spectacular—too much was going on and we were introduced to too many new concepts at once. I have an awful lot of questions and not terribly many answers. It also felt like most of the events in this book were pretty coincidental. I bought into it enough to enjoy it, but I would have liked that coincidence to have been resolved a bit much. Once of my pet peeves in plot arcs is having every single piece of the puzzle happen to be there because of something else, unrelated, going on at the same time, and that’s kind of what this felt like to me. If it later turns out that there’s something manipulating said events into place, I’ll be perfectly happy with that, but for now I’m a little unsatisfied.

Also, way to go with the bittersweet ending. It may just be the fact that it’s so foggy today that I can barely see out my window, but that was almost depressing … In a good way, of course.

So, five stars for the concept, but only four overall due to general execution. I anticipate that I’ll enjoy book 2 an awful lot more, and I can’t wait to give it a go 🙂

You definitely will like book 2 more than book 1. I like this series a lot, mostly for the very unique world-building and way-magic-works. I will say though, the stories never stop feeling complicated, at least for me. That’s my one gripe, too.